never seemed to have been much sexual activity between the two, and just as Kate seemed to have bisexual tendencies, so did Luddy. It was in 1930 that Kate met Laura Harding, the woman who would in one way or another share her life for many years. It was also in 1930 that Hepburn played a major role inArt and Mrs. Bottle, a show that became a Broadway hit. There followed two successful theatrical years and, most important, her contact in 1932 with the agent Leland Hayward who would arrange for her first Hollywood film roles. Once in Hollywood, the woman whom audiences knew as Katharine Hepburn began to emerge, even as the more private Kate remained intact as she manipulated the external image of a movie star.

Hepburn’s first motion picture, Bill of Divorcement (1932), directed by George Cukor, was a smash hit, and overnight she became a movie star of tremendous significance. She was compared with Greta Garbo and characterized as the most exciting new face since Marlene Dietrich. Kate now had the worldwide fame and attention she had been seeking all of her life. Important also was that Hepburn had begun an artistic partnership with Cukor, who would remain her great friend and director throughout her life. Hepburn loved living in Los Angeles where she could take long walks in the fields and swim nude in the ocean. She rarely went back east to visit her husband, and in 1933 Luddy’s hopes for children were crushed by a dangerous and complicated surgery performed on Hepburn by her father, a procedure that suggests uterine cancer.

Hepburn was having little to do with her husband anyway. She was spending most of her time with her friend Laura Harding at the soirees given at Cukor’s house, and Mann makes the unqualified point that Cukor’s circle was openly homosexual. The relationship between Kate and Cukor was close. He led her through all of her early triumphs in film. He was, as Mann so aptly observes, the father Kate had longed for all of her life, and it was in Little Women (1933), directed by Cukor, that Hepburn became the unquestioned reigning queen of international film actresses, critic after critic praising her work and calling the film triumphant.

Her new stardom, however, would soon be tarnished. In 1934 Hepburn suffered two artistic setbacks, first in a poorly received film and then in The Lake, a Broadway production that failed miserably, characterized by Dorothy Parker’s famous remark that in the play Hepburn had run the gamut of emotions from A to B. Nevertheless, Hepburn would become a fine actress, and under the guidance of George Stevens she once again triumphed in the 1935 film Alice Adams. By this time she was a fixture in the Hollywood heavens. She had divorced Luddy and seemed to be attracted to several strong men, perhaps the most famous of whom was the aviator Howard Hughes, whose relationship with Hepburn would be revisited in the 2004 film The Aviator.

Mann notes readers that Hepburn continued to have close relationships with women and, like most of the men in Hepburn’s love life, that Hughes was rumored to be bisexual. Nevertheless Kate was about to toss aside the tomboy image that permeated her early work. In the 1940 film The Philadelphia Story, she appears as mature, beautiful, glamorous, and sensitive. Moreover, the times were catching up with her offscreen image of a woman in slacks. The war was forcing women to be more assertive. Rosie the Riveter had arrived and many women were now “in pants.” Hepburn was also to become her most feminine in the 1942 hit Woman of the Year. It was her first film for MGM, but even more important, it was her first film with the man with whom she would be associated for the remainder of her life: Spencer Tracy.

In the several hit films they made together, Hepburn is always the brittle, sharp beauty who is brought into submission by Tracy’s character: a man of dominance and strength. Mann points out that the relationship depicted is exactly that of Hepburn’s parents. Moreover, although Tracy was married, he and Hepburn apparently lived together for several years in much the same relationship as that depicted in their films. Hepburn was a star in the film heavens, made all the brighter by her famous costar. Mann questions whether the relationship was ever sexual though. He does not doubt that the two shared a deep and abiding love, but he observes that Hepburn continued close relationships with her female friends, especially Laura Harding. He also indicates that Tracy had sexual interests in males. Whatever the case, the two continued together both on screen and off screen for a lifetime.

Although she now had her perfect image partner in Tracy, Hepburn suddenly had other image problems. In the late 1940’s she was suspected of being a communist by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Always one to polish her public image, she starred with Tracy in Adam’s Rib, a film about the ideal American couple, which became the biggest box office attraction of 1949-1950. Then she portrayed herself as a woman who sacrifices her life for her country in The African Queen (1951), another of her great successes, this time appearing not as a brittle beauty but as a middle-aged woman bent on serving her country. When she returned from filming in Africa, she found Tracy living in a rented cottage on Cukor’s estate, drinking heavily and gaining weight. Moving into a nearby cottage, she now began her long ordeal as Tracy’s nursemaid. She also entered the final phase of her public life in which she would become not simply a movie star but a genuine actress and theater artist.

The story of Hepburn as a truly fine dramatic actress occupies the latter third of Mann’s book. Tracy had died in 1967, and, while she still had Laura, Hepburn began to lean all the more heavily on her secretary, Phyllis Wilbourn. Hepburn’s persona of artistnot starbegan with Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), a film about interracial marriage for which she received an Oscar, one of four such awards, the last of which would be for On Golden Pond (1981). There was also a 1962 film version of Eugene O’Neill’s play Long Day’s Journey into Night (pr, pb. 1956) and many years of work in classics by William Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw, and even the ancient Greeks. In all, at her death at ninety-six Hepburn had ventured bravely and had climbed to the pinnacle of her profession to be venerated internationally as a true artistic treasure.

William Mann’s story is indeed long, but such an exceptional subject requires more than simply adequate attention. He is further to be complimented in his perceptive examination of Hepburn’s complicated psychology as well as that of her close associates. While he delves into both heterosexual and homosexual arrangements, he does so without lasciviousness. In all, this is a book of interest not only to those who grew up in the last century but to anyone interested in the complex psychology of public figures.